by: 
BreakingTheWaves
BreakingTheWavesWednesday, November 12, 2008 at 1:26:00 PM EST
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Howdy, everyone and welcome to Amplify! I’m honored and excited to be part of Advocates for Youth new site for youth activists to share their truth and speak their mind – and I can’t wait to read your stories, rants, raves and ideas for changing the world!
I’ve been part of the Advocates for Youth family since I was fifteen years old and an activist for youth’s sexual rights for over a third of my life. I was born and raised as a Southern Baptist evangelical in Lubbock, Texas and took a virginity pledge at fifteen with an abstinence-only program at my church – led by the pastor that also taught the “secular” abstinence-only-until-marriage program at my school. As you probably know, these don’t work so well - my town had some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancy in the country.
After a friend whose boyfriend had told her she couldn’t get pregnant her first time did, I joined a local youth commission working to get comprehensive sex education into the schools. I could hardly believe that the teachers and the administrators were refusing to give us information that could save our lives and that no one was saying anything about it. I realized if we wanted our rights, we were going to have to use our voices.
We organized events, passed around petitions, got the support of local doctors and the national media, and started work on getting a much needed Gay Straight Alliance in the high school. After three years, the school board refused our proposals and the city de-funded the youth commission – effectively, so they thought, getting rid of the pesky youth so obnoxiously asking for the tools to make healthy sexual decisions.
Unfortunately for the city officials, a documentary film crew had been following us the whole way and the footage they gathered became The Education of Shelby Knox, a film that won an award at Sundance and is now used in high schools and colleges across the nation. While Lubbock still has an abstinence-only policy, a city commission has been appointed to consider comprehensive sex education – and the pastor who had been scaring students for years is not so welcome in the schools anymore!
I left Lubbock, went off to the University of Texas, and began traveling across the country with the film, telling my story and listening to those of other young people. The more I traveled and talked to young women about their sexual health and rights the more I started to make the connection between controlling women’s reproductive options and controlling women in general. I was becoming a feminist, one story at a time.
Now, at 22, feminist would be the first word I use to describe myself, loudly and proudly. I know that scares some people – but feminism has gotten a pretty bad rap from those who are opposed to our goals. After all, the dictionary definition is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social and economic equality. Who can argue with that, especially since one half of the population can’t really be equal until the other half is as well?
Feminism isn’t about restricting or telling you what you can do, or just for a certain type of woman or just for women at all – feminism is about hearing your own experience in another’s story and understanding that there is nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with them, but that there are social systems in place designed to make you both feel inferior – and that has to change. Feminists go about this in a lot of ways – organizing on campuses, petitions, performances, gender-bending, writing, speaking – the possibilities are endless and I hope to highlight a lot of them here, in Breaking the Waves.
A note on the name: The feminist movement has been divided into “waves”, with the first wave being the suffragists who won the right to vote, the second wave being the most visible as the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s, and the Third Wave being young women born between 1961 and 1981. Am I (and you) the Fourth Wave? I don’t know – and frankly I don’t care all that much, hence the name of this column. The point isn’t what we are called, but what we do and the stories we tell.
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